Overview:

Building just and durable democracies in the 21st century depends on extending the benefits of higher education to all, and enabling students of all social, ethnic, and economic backgrounds to experience and value diversity and inclusiveness in their pursuit of learning.

Mission and Goals

The Diversity program seeks to help diversify the next generation of college and university faculty through the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) and other pipeline programs; it also aims to strengthen institutions that improve educational attainment of historically underrepresented groups. More generally, the Diversity grantmaking area supports projects or research focused on the relationship between diversity and learning.

New areas and strengthened emphases include:

An initiative to increase representation of the Latino/a population in PhD programs and the professoriate

Programs to increase the percentage of MMUF fellows who enroll in PhD programs

Organizations outside the United States that are equivalent to US public charities

A non-US organization without a 501(c)(3) ruling from the IRS should be prepared to demonstrate its capacity to receive Foundation funds, either through determination by counsel that it is the equivalent of a US public charity or by other means of qualification.

The Foundation, at its discretion, may make restricted grants to organizations without such an equivalency determination, including to domestic for-profit organizations and foreign entities.

Ineligibility:

In addition to overhead, indirect costs, and capital costs (construction, renovation, equipment), the Diversity program does not fund fellowships and scholarships to individual students, diversity initiatives that focus on the STEM fields or on other non-humanities fields such as medicine, psychology, social work, journalism, law, and business, professional development initiatives apart from those supporting faculty development.

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Our Mission

Nonprofits and academics are accelerating social progress and innovation. It's time for a lack of funding to stop getting in the way. We built Instrumentl to help you move the world forward, one project at a time.